Kaviar, which is quite excellent and unlike anything we have in England, being the whole eggs of the sturgeon instead of a messy black compound.
Renstek, smoked reindeer, which is not nearly so nice as it is when eaten fresh in the winter in Norway.
Ägg, cold hard-boiled eggs cut in slices and arranged with sardines or anchovies.
Ost omelette, a delicious sort of custard or omelette, made with cheese and served hot, although everything else on the side-table is cold.
Mushrooms cooked in cream is another favourite dish.
Then small glass plates with slices of cold eel in jelly, salmon in jelly, tongue, ham, potted meat, etc., complete the Smörgåsbord, which is often composed of fifteen or twenty dishes.
These delicacies are many of them delicious, but as the same things appear at each meal three times a day, one gets heartily sick of them in the end, and, to an English mind, they certainly seem out of place at breakfast time.
There are many excellent breads in Finland—
Frankt bröd is really French bread; but anything white is called Frankt bröd, and very good it is, as a rule.
Råg bröd, or rye bread, is the ordinary black bread of the country, made in large flat loaves.
Hålkaka, the peasants' only food in some parts, is baked two or three times a year, so they put the bread away in a loft or upon the kitchen rafters; consequently, by the time the next baking day comes round it is as hard as a brick. A knife often cannot cut it. It is invariably sour, some of the last mixing being always left in the tub or bucket, that the necessary acidity may be ensured.
Knäckebröd is a thin kind of cake, made of rye and corn together, something like Scotch oatcake, with a hole in the middle, so that it may be strung up in rows like onions on a stick in the kitchen. When thin and fresh it is excellent, but when thick and stale a dog biscuit would be equally palatable.
Wiborgs kringla, called in Finnish Wiipurin rinkeli, is a great speciality, its real home and origin being Wiborg itself. It is a sort of cake, but its peculiarity is that it is baked on straw, some of the straw always adhering to the bottom. It is made in the form of a true lover's knot, of the less fantastic kind, and a golden sign of this shape hangs outside to determine a baker's shop; even in Petersburg and in the north of Finland a modified representation of the Wiborgs kringla also denotes a bakery.
Having partaken of the odds and ends mentioned, the ordinary mid-day meal or dinner begins, usually between two and four o'clock.
The hostess, who sits at the head of the table, with her husband generally on one side and her most honoured guest on the other, with two huge soup-tureens before her, asks those present whether they will have soup or filbunke, a very favourite summer dish. This is made from fresh milk which has stood in a tureen till it turns sour and forms a sort of curds, when it is eaten with sugar and powdered ginger. It appears at every meal in the summer, and is excellent on a hot day. It must be made of fresh milk left twenty-four hours in a warm kitchen for the cream to rise, and twenty-four hours in the cellar, free from draught, to cool afterwards. The castor sugar is invariably served in a tall silver basin—that is to say, the bowl, with its two elegant handles, stands on a well-modelled pillar about eight or ten inches high, altogether a very superior and majestic form of sugar basin.
There are two special drinks in Finland—one for the rich, the other for the poor.
Mjöd is one of the most delicious beverages imaginable. It is not champagne, and not cider, but a sort of effervescing drink of pale yellow colour made at the breweries, and extremely refreshing on a hot day. It costs about one shilling and sixpence a bottle, sometimes more, and is often handed round during an afternoon call with the coffee and marmelader, the famous Russian sweetmeats made of candied fruits.
The other drink is called in Swedish Svagdricka, but as it is really a peasant drink, and as the peasants speak Finnish, it is generally known as Kalja, pronounced "Kal-e-yah." It looks black, and is really small beer. Very small indeed it is, too, with a nasty burnt taste, and the natives up-country all make it for themselves, each farm having half a dozen or twenty hop poles of its own, which flavours the Kalja for the whole party for a year, so its strength of hop or amount of bubble is not very great.
From the middle of June till the middle of July we ate wild strawberries three times a day with sugar and cream! They simply abound, and very delicious these little Mansikka are. So plentiful are they that Suomi is actually known as "strawberry land."
There are numbers of wild berries in Finland; indeed, they are quite a speciality, and greet the traveller daily in soup—sweet soups being very general—or they are made into delicious syrups, are served as compôte with meat, or transformed into puddings.
Here are a few of them—
| Finnish. | Latin. | |
|---|---|---|
| Mansikka | Fragaria vesca | Wild strawberries, found in profusion everywhere. |
| Mesikka | Rubus arcticus | Red, with splendid aroma. Liqueur is made from them. |
| Vaatukka | Rubus idaeus | Wild raspberry. |
| Lakka | Rubus chamaemorus | Black. Often made into a kind of black juice, and taken as sweet soup. |
| Mustikka | Vaccinium myrtillus | (Wortleberries)—Black. Often made into soup of a glorious colour. |
| Puolukka | Vaccinium vitis idaea | (Red whortleberry)—Like a small cranberry. Eaten with meat. |
| Juolukka | Vaccinium uliginosum | A common black kind of berry, not very eatable. |
| Herukka | Ribes nigrum | Cranberry. |
| Karpalo | Vaccinium occycoccus | This berry is not gathered in the autumn, but is left under the snow all the winter, ready to be picked in spring when the snow melts, as the fruit is better when it has been frozen. It keeps in a tub for months without any preparation, and is particularly good as a jelly when eaten with cream. |
| Muurain | (Swedish, Hjortron) | In appearance is like a yellow raspberry; grows in the extreme north in the morasses during August. It is a most delicious fruit, with a pine-tree flavour. |
"Will you have some sweetbread?" we were once asked, but as we were drinking coffee at the moment we rather wondered why we should be going back to the éntrees—our stupidity, of course. Sweetbread is the name given to all simple forms of cake in Finland; a great deal of it is eaten, and it is particularly good.
At dinner, hock, claret, or light beer are drunk as a rule; but at breakfast and supper, beer and milk are the usual beverages, the latter appearing in enormous jugs—indeed, we have actually seen a glass one that stood over two feet high.
After dinner, coffee is immediately served with